It doesn't seem to matter what the Labour Party does, some people will simply not allow the subject of anti-Semitism to be dealt with calmly and rationally.
This hysteria is clear on both sides. This is clear whether we're talking about:
- Chris Williamson's latest crass comments about Labour being "too apologetic" (comments that have drawn me back into writing about this subject again).
- Margaret Hodge publicly bombarding the Labour disciplinary bods with dozens upon dozens of anti-Semitism cases to investigate 90% of which turned out to not even be Labour Party members, then having the absolute gall to complain that they're taking too long to investigate the actual genuine cases!
- Or social media conspiracists outright denying that there's even a problem at all.
Moral perspective
From a moral perspective it's obvious that Labour should be apologetic every time an example of anti-Semitism is found amongst the 500,000+ people in the Labour ranks.
It's obviously fair to add context too by pointing out the facts and evidence that partisan anti-Labour critics would never provide. Stuff like the fact that the rates of anti-Semetic views amongst Labour supporters have gone down dramatically since Jeremy Corbyn became leader in 2015, the fact that disciplinary procedures have been sped up significantly since Jennie Formby took over from the Blairite Ian McNicol at the NEC, and the fact that anti-Semitism is and always has been way more prevalent in the Tory party than Labour.
However, it's beyond obvious that whenever anti-Semites are caught in the Labour Party, the party needs to apologise and demonstrate their continued commitment to combating all forms of racism and bigotry with disciplinary procedures and bans.
Realpolitik perspective
From a realpolitik perspective Labour is obviously getting the whole thing completely wrong.
Instead of apologising and seeking to actively deal with the issue, the mainstream media have educated us about what the correct response is with their absolute dearth of coverage about the Tory Islamophobia scandal.
The Tory party has been accused of tolerating despicable anti-Muslim bigotry by several senior Tory politicians, including Sayeeda Warsi. For over a year the Tories have been refusing to apologise, refusing to investigate, and outright refusing to listen to calls by the Muslim Council of Britain for an inquiry into anti-Muslim bigotry in the Tory ranks.
The Tories have simply stonewalled the subject, and a result the mainstream media have rewarded them with an absolutely minuscule fraction of the negative coverage they've heaped on the Labour anti-Semitism issue!
As far as the mainstream press are concerned Labour talking about and debating anti-Semitism in order to deal with the issue is worthy of inordinately more coverage that the Tories staying silent about anti-Muslim bigotry, and outright refusing to do anything whatever to deal with the problem in their party!
The ones who talk about the issue and take action are continually bombarded with criticism, while the ones who stay silent and refuse to take action are given a free pass.
Given these circumstances, from a realpolitik perspective it's obviously absolutely stupid for Labour to keep talking about anti-Semitism when the strategy of steadfastly refusing to engage has worked so well for the Tories when it comes to anti-Muslim hate in their ranks.
History
One of the main reasons Labour can't stop talking about the issue is that the party has a long history of standing up for minorities. It was the left who stood with the Jewish people at Cable Street to oppose Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists in 1936 while the Tories we're signing up in droves to anti-Semitic pro-Nazi pressure groups like the Right Club.
And it was the left who stood with the Jewish community at Wood Green in the 1970s to face down the National Front thugs too.
Given this history it's obvious that any level of anti-Semitism in the Labour ranks feels like a betrayal that needs to be apologised for, and rightly so.
With the Tories it's a different story. In the 1930s they embraced the new fad of Nazism and joined up to anti-Semitic hate groups in their droves. In the 1960s they ran racist "If you want a coloured for a neighbour, vote Liberal or Labour" leaflet campaigns in by-elections. In the 1980s they sided with Apartheid South Africa while the Tory youth were parading around in "Hang Mandela" T-shirts. And Theresa May is personally responsible for the introduction of sickeningly racist legislation in 2014 that was used to deny black Britons the right to housing, employment, banking services, social security, health care, and the right to return to Britain. This vile "Hostile Environment" legislation even resulted in black Britons dying in exile overseas.
The Tory party has a long history of racism stretching from their adoration of Nazism in the 1930s all the way to the present and their current policies of deporting black Britons and turning a blind eye to anti-Muslim bigotry in their own ranks.
Bigotry in the Tory ranks isn't a touchstone issue because there have always been loads of bigots in the Tory party. It's not news, and never will be, because it's just accepted as the norm.
Weaponisation
If you're the kind of person who can hold two thoughts in your head simultaneously then try this:
1. A tiny minority of Labour's 500,000+ members have expressed anti-Semitic views. They people should be weeded out because racism and bigotry of all types are unacceptable.
2. A lot of very bad faith opportunists are deliberately weaponising the Labour anti-Semitism issue for their own cynical political purposes.
There are no contradictions whatever between these two statements because they're both observable facts, however you have to be extremely careful stating the second fact because the very opportunists the statement refers to will attempt to misrepresent it as if it's a denial of the first statement that anti-Semitism is a problem.
There's obviously a huge distinction between pointing out the that Labour-opponents and mainstream media hacks like to use super-cynical tricks to weaponise anti-Semitism (like deliberately conflating the anti-Semetic abuse of jailed extreme-right thugs with the Labour Party, or taking quotations miles out of context in order to manufacture outrage), and outright denial that there's any problem at all.
But if cynical opportunists are prepared to mislead, manipulate, and lie in order to weaponise anti-Semitism for their own political purposes, why on earth wouldn't they use the same dishonest tactics to attack anyone who calls them out?
Tory glee
The weaponisation of anti-Semitism for political purposes is particularly galling when it comes from Tory MPs and partisan pro-Tory pro-austerity hacks in the mainstream media.
What's even more galling still is their barely suppressed glee whenever anyone tries to argue back that they're hypocrites due to the brazen Tory refusal to even address anti-Muslim bigotry in their own party.
They respond with glee because they know that not only are they winning from a realpolitik perspective by simply refusing to talk about or address their own bigotry issues, they also know that the perception that they're an anti-Muslim party actually plays extremely well with the sizeable extreme-right ultranationalist blue-kip demographic they've been openly courting and welcoming on board with open arms ever since the collapse of UKIP.
They know that anti-Semitism is a hugely problematic issue for Labour because of the left's history of solidarity with Jewish people, and they also know that accusations of anti-Muslim hate in the Tory ranks actually serve as recruitment calling cards amongst the far-right demographics they're actively targeting for support.
And they know they're being opportunistic hypocrites by banging on about Labour anti-Semitism when they have no intention whatever of dealing with much more serious problems of bigotry in their own ranks, but that's just how amoral opportunists roll.
From a realpolitik perspective they'd be idiots to actually investigate accusations of anti-Muslim bigotry in their party and root out the worst offenders because they know that doing the right thing like Labour have been doing would just invite media scrutiny and lots of negative commentary.
Conclusion
The conclusion is that the moral thing to do is to fight anti-Semitism and all other forms of bigotry, and apologise whenever bigots are exposed in your own party's ranks.
But the behaviour of the Tories and the mainstream media proves that from a realpolitik perspective any kind of apology whatever is "too apologetic" because why apologise when the media give you an infinitely easier ride when you just stonewall the bigotry problem like the Tories have?
So the answer to the question of "have Labour been too apologetic on anti-Semitism?" depends entirely on whether you believe in doing the right thing, or you've got such a tribal win at all costs mentality that you'll steadfastly ignore evidence of bigotry within your party purely for party political advantage.
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The gullibility of some people never ceases to astound.
Even when it's absolutely obvious that a breakaway group of right-wing Labour MPs and Tories has absolutely nothing to do with Brexit, and everything to do with a desperate last-ditch effort to divide the Labour vote and keep the Tory austerity agenda rolling on, huge numbers of people who consider themselves rational, suddenly begin falling over themselves to continue believing the lies and deceptions of a bunch of egotistical fabulists.
If you look at the facts rather than mindlessly and uncritically absorbing mainstream media propaganda tropes, the entire justification for the existence of the Independent Group is obviously a fraud.
The ex-Labour component said they had to quit Labour because the party wasn't doing enough to oppose Brexit, and the ex-Tory component said they had to quit the Tories because they were in hock to Jacob Rees-Mogg's ERG Brextremists and the bigoted DUP sectarians that Theresa May bribed into propping up her shambles of a government.
But the evidence proves this to be absolutely false.
On January 29th Labour tabled a Brexit amendment proposing another referendum as an option in order to prevent Theresa May and the ERG Brextremists driving the UK economy off a cliff, but the three ex-Tory members of the squatter group of MPs all actively sided with Theresa May, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Boris Johnson, and the 10 DUP sectarians to vote against this amendment [source].
If you ever needed absolute proof that opposing Brexit was never their true priority, the fact that these three voted against Labour's amendment 307 aimed at stopping Theresa May's reckless game of brinkmanship with the nation's future less than a month before becoming political squatters is it, isn't it?
And the fact that the ex-Labour component have joined up with these outrageous ex-Tories who less than a month previously were actively siding with the ERG Brextremsists and the DUP to prevent Labour's efforts to oppose Tory Brexit is proof that the priority isn't opposing Brexit for them either.
So if their stated justification is an easily demonstrable lie, what is the ulterior agenda?
Well the ex-Labour squatter MP Gavin Shuker (the one who decided to set their group up as a private company rather than a political party in order to hide who is bankrolling them) said that their primary objective was begging Theresa May to form a pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, anti-welfare coalition with them. "I'm willing to extend confidence and supply to your government so it doesn’t fall over" being his exact words.
The ex-Labour squatter MP Chris Leslie (one of the right-wing idiots who came up with the staggeringly unappealing austerity-lite posturing that trashed Labour's election chances at the 2015 general election) went even further, saying that the group would refuse to do everything in their power to stop the Tory Brexit chaos, because if stopping hard-right Tory Brexit meant giving Jeremy Corbyn another shot at removing Theresa May from power, they'd vote with the Tories to prevent that from happening!
The ex-Tory squatter MP Anna Soubry made things absolutely clear when she used the word "marvellous" to describe the Coalition austerity-enforcing, wage-repressing, public service-wrecking, social security-slashing, privatisation obsessed dogma of the 2010-2015 period that collapsed living standards and created the wave of public fury that drove Brexit narrowly over the winning line in 2016.
Instead of looking at the austerity disease that caused Brexit in the first place, Soubry is pretending to treat the symptoms (while actively voting against another referendum that may have helped to treat the symptoms) and actually continuing to praise the toxic Tory austerity dogma that caused the symptoms in the first place as "marvellous"!
And then Soubry went on the television to argue that she should be allowed to continue actively campaigning for the Tory party and their ruinous austerity dogma from under the umbrella of the Independent Group, and her fellow squatter MP Chuka Umunna actually sat next to her nodding and agreeing that members of his absurd vanity project should be allowed to actively campaign for the Tories and promote Tory austerity dogma!
The obvious problem is that the hopelessly gullible are incredibly difficult to convince, because in order to see the squatter MPs as the cynical opportunists hiding a pro-Tory pro-austerity, anti-worker, anti-investment agenda behind a cloak of Brexit rhetoric, people need to accept that they were foolish to take these politicians from deep within the heart of the Westminster establishment class at their word, and admit that this gullibility is why they got so easily duped.
If we've learned anything from the last few years in politics it's that huge numbers of people would rather ignore the facts and evidence to continue believing absolute nonsense, rather than take the ego hit of accepting they got conned.
So even when we point out that the squatter group's entire justification for existing is a fraud, and that they're just a bunch of austerity fetishists openly scrounging for places in a Tory-led pro-austerity coalition, people's egos won't allow them to admit that they were hopelessly gullible rubes to ever fall for it in the first place.
But then the gossamer-like transparency of their fraud is so fragile that it's enough to make us suspect that Brexit isn't actually the main issue with a lot of these "centrists" at all, and that the actual unstated priority all along has been an absolute desperation to keep the Tories in power so they can carry on brutally punishing the poor and disabled, trashing ordinary workers' wages, gutting public services, and throttling Britain's economic potential with their toxic austerity dogma like they have been doing for the last 9 years.
The Independent Group is not a brave new challenge to the political orthodoxy, it's people from deep within the political orthodoxy desperately hawking "more of the same" under the guise of opposing the hard-right Brexit that several of their group were voting in favour of less than a month previously!
So the only people left promoting these democracy-fearing squatter MPs are either hopelessly gullible idiots who just rote learn and repeat their political opinions without doing even the most basic fact-checking, or cynical and malicious propagandists who are deliberately hiding their pro-Tory pro-austerity agenda behind a crude veneer of anti-Brexit rhetoric.
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With only slightly more than a month to go before Theresa May runs the clock down to the ruinous hard-right Brexit chaos that many in her party always wanted the Westminster establishment class coughed up an extraordinary response.
Instead of seeking to unify opposition to Theresa May's egregious delaying tactics, and outrageous threat to trash the British economy with a "no deal" meltdown if she doesn't get their own way, they decided to try to completely monopolise the political agenda with the launch of an extraordinary vanity project.
After leading us to the brink of calamity the Westminster establishment class have decided that their "solution" to their own mess is a fake political party (set up as a private company to avoid revealing who is bankrolling them) with no leader, no manifesto, no members, no internal democracy, no transparency, no respect for the constituencies that elected them, and no disciplinary procedures for dealing with racist MPs in their ranks!
For the first week the only policy they seem to have agreed on is that they'll beg Theresa May for the opportunity to prop up her pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, anti-investment government in return for another EU referendum in which she gets to pick the options, the wording, and the timing of the ballot to her own personal advantage, and then actively promote hard-right Brexit from Downing Street! (can anyone remember how the AV referendum turned out for the Lib-Dems?).
But now we have another policy they seem to agree on, which is that the three ex-Tory members of the parliamentary squatter group should be allowed to continue actively campaigning for the Tory party, and that if the Tory party don't want them to, then that's a sign of growing "intolerance" and "tribalism" in politics.
It's quite extraordinary these ludicrous self-publicists trying to redefine the longstanding political convention that party membership and affiliation is lost when members begin actively campaigning for rival political groups as some kind of uniquely modern kind of "intolerance".
Not only did the ex-Labour squatter MP Chuka Umunna sit beside Anna Soubry as she expressed her desire to continue actively campaigning for the Tory party, he actually agreed with her and joined in by suggesting the kind of rhetoric she should be using to decry the fact that the Tories don't actually want to be associated with a politician who quit their party to join a rival group!
We all know that Soubry is a massive fan of ruinous Tory austerity dogma, unprecedented wage repression, devastating public service cuts, and the barbaric treatment of sick and vulnerable people because she voted in favour of all of it, and then subsequently described it all as "marvellous" even after quitting the Tories to join the squatter group, so it's not really a surprise that she wants to carry on actively promoting these malicious Tory policies.
What's even more bonkers is that Chuka Umunna, who was elected on Labour's anti-austerity pro-investment manifesto in 2017 is now actively deriding the Tory party for not wanting his fellow squatter MP to campaign in favour of their austerity agenda!
Chuka's now such a fan of Tory austerity dogma that he thinks his fellow squatter MPs should have the right to continue campaigning for the Tory party while they pretend to be challengers to the establishment order!
Allowing your party members to actively campaign for a rival political party during elections is absolute idiocy, even by the standards of the right-wing pro-austerity centrists who devised Labour's lamentable "austerity-lite" strategy that lost Labour the 2015 general election.
This piss-witted wooly-minded, Tory-sympathising strategic ineptitude just goes to illustrate what a disaster it would have been if the likes of Chuka Umunna or Chris Leslie had ever got their hands on the Labour leadership doesn't it?
Perhaps the most extraordinary thing of all is that these egotistical opportunists from deep within the Westminster establishment class have tried to position themselves as some kind of new and exciting alternative to our "broken politics", but the only policies they seem to have agreed on in over a week is that they should beg Theresa May to form a pro-austerity coalition with the Tory party, and that members of their group should be allowed to continue actively campaigning for the Tory party from under the tinge umbrella!
It's unbelievably Orwellian to pretend to be revolutionising Westminster politics, when your words and actions betray the fact that you're actually just a desperate rearguard action to keep the Tories in power, and keep their devastating austerity and wage repression policies alive.
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Numerous people have written to me asking me to look into a list of 26 reasons to be afraid of the Lisbon Treaty that has gone mega-viral on Facebook numerous times via copy n' paste reposting, often with changes to the introduction to make it look like the list was personally compiled by the poster, not just copied from elsewhere.
I've included a image of one of the most widely shared versions of this pack of lies so you check it out as I go through it point by point.
Introduction:
Before we even get to the 26 points there are already a load of red flags in the introduction.
We're expected to believe that the poster read the entire Lisbon Treaty, which is a crude and highly suspect appeal to authority.
They're positioning themselves as the "expert" who has read and analysed the whole Lisbon Treaty, meaning we should uncritically take them at their word about what they say about it.
This posturing as an expert is then completely undermined by a paragraph of ALL CAPS SHOUTING which includes the first glaringly obvious lie. The Lisbon Treaty does not come into force in 2020, it already came into force in 2009!
The Lisbon Treaty is not a future threat to be afraid of, it's the current circumstances that have existed within the EU for the last decade!
Then we get to the assertion that no Remainer ever asks what will happen if we stay in the EU, which is another outright lie.
I'm a massive critic of Tory hard-right Brexit yet I also have all kinds of legitimate concerns about the future of the EU, such as the draconian copyright extremist legislation they're trying to pass, the blind eye the EU institutions have turned to the extraordinary political repression in member states like Spain, Hungary, and Poland, their enforcement of ruinous austerity dogma on member states like Greece, and their use of extrajudicial ISDS measures in trade deals.
It is possible to have reservations about the EU, yet not believe that the best solution to these problems is to conduct a chaotic job-destroying Tory-administered flounce out of the EU.
Having legitimate questions about the future of the EU obviously is a completely different thing to wilfully spreading a pack of fear-mongering lies, which is what everyone who has shared iterations of this Facebook post has been doing.
Point 1: Loss of abstention veto (lie)
There is no abstention veto to lose. No country has ever been able to torpedo EU legislation just by abstaining. Unsurprisingly it's always necessary to actually vote against legislation in order to stop it. So the only people who could be upset about point 1 are those who don't understand the structures of the EU, or even just how voting works in general, meaning they fear the UK losing a right they never actually had.
Here's an article detailing how voting in the European Council actually works if you're interested.
Point 2. Federalisation (lie)
The Lisbon Treaty does not introduce EU federalisation. In order for that to happen the EU member states would have to agree a new treaty to extend the powers of the EU.
Voting on treaties is very different to the European Council voting system. Treaties must be agreed by all member states unanimously, so if a treaty enforcing federalisation of all member states is proposed, all member states must vote in favour of it.
This has not happened, and will not happen.
3. Accept the Euro by 2022 (lie)
If you mindlessly believe this copy n' paste thread all member states will be forced to join the Euro by 2022. If you believed the Daily Telegraph in 2014 all member states would be forced to join the Euro by 2020. If you believed the Daily Express in 2017 all member states would be forced to join the Euro by 2025.
Why do they all use different dates? Because they're making it up, but this Facebook propaganda thread is particularly bad because it outright lies that the Lisbon Treaty forces member states to join the Euro when it does no such thing.
4. Moving the London stock exchange to Frankfurt (lie)
How utterly gullible would you have to be to actually believe that the EU could force the London stock exchange to move to Germany through the Lisbon Treaty?
The origin for this lie is the proposed merger between the London and Frankfurt stock exchanges that was eventually blocked by the EU competition regulator!
If you are worried about British-based financial services moving overseas, then you should be absolutely horrified by Brexit, which has already caused a mass exodus of capital ($1 trillion in assets) and thousands of financial services jobs to other countries that remain in the EU.
Even Tory Brextremist Jacob Rees-Mogg has joined the exodus by shifting his investment fund to Ireland in order to keep a foot in the Single Market!
5. Supremacy of European Parliament and ECJ (lie)
This point relies on a crass misunderstanding of what the ECJ (European Court of Justice) is, and how powers can be shared between different legislative bodies (consider the federal and state governments in the United States, and how state law can over-rule federal law on all manner of issues such as cannabis legalisation).
A good example of how they've got this so wrong is to consider the December 2018 ECJ ruling that found that the UK Parliament has the sovereign democratic right to revoke Article 50, and that the European Parliament or any of the other EU institutions can do absolutely nothing to tinker with the UK's terms of membership as a punishment for the three year farce we've put them through.
The ECJ actually ruled that the UK parliament is sovereign and that there's nothing any of the EU institutions can do about it, yet somehow, according to this copy n' paste fear-list they're the enemy to be feared and despised!
6. Abolish parliament! (lie)
The nasty EU and ECJ are going to force the UK to accept everything they say so we might as well abolish the House of Commons and the House of Lords!
In reality EU legislation only makes up 13% of UK law (even after decades of integration), so even if we completely accept the ludicrous proposition that the UK would be forced to accept 100% of EU law, then there's still the other 87% of UK law for parliament to concentrate on.
Even if this fear-mongering nonsense were true, why on earth would it mean that parliament would cease to exist as we know it? It's a complete non sequitur.
7. No trade deals (absurdity)
The threat that the Lisbon Treaty somehow rules out Britain's future ability to make trade deals is absolutely absurd because this isn't some future threat, it's the actual current state of affairs.
The EU Single Market is the single largest trading block on the planet which gives it enormous power to craft trade deals to its own advantage. All of the individual states that decided to join made the decision to give up their ability to make their own trade deals in return for access to the Single Market and the advantage of pooled negotiating power.
Repurposing the actual current state of affairs as a terrifying future threat is an extraordinary tactic, and it just goes to show how gullible people can be that the tens of thousands to have shared this nonsense didn't even notice that they were being directed to fear the introduction of what is actually the norm, and has been for decades.
8. No trade tariffs (absurdity)
This is basically just a reiteration of the previous point to present the current state of affairs as a terrifying future threat. Trade tariffs are decided communally by the EU. If it didn't work like this the Single Market and Customs Union couldn't exist in their current form.
9. No trade quotas (absurdity)
Another reiteration of the same idiotic effort to present the current state of affairs as a terrifying future threat.
10. Loss of fishing rights (lie)
EU member states will not lose control of their fishing rights in 2020. It's hard to tell where this lie even stems from. It's got nothing to do with the Lisbon treaty, that's for sure.
There are EU plans to improve sustainable fishing practices in 2020 in order to prevent the depletion of fishing stocks (the next step after the abandonment of discards in 2015), but these plans actually introduce more regionalisation, and more stakeholder consultation.
Anyone who tries to present these sustainability plans as a loss of all fishing rights is simply lying through their teeth.
11. Loss of oil and gas rights (lie)
There is absolutely nothing in the Lisbon Treaty forcing member states to give up their oil and gas rights. In fact this complaint is so loosely worded that it's not even clear what it means. Are they trying to say that the exploration rights are to be given up? The territorial rights? The rights to collect tax revenues on oil industry profits? The right to assign oil industry revenues to national GDP?
It's just naked fear-mongering about the nasty EU taking what is "ours". The contentiousness of this point should be obvious to all Scottish people given that the UK government has essentially forced Scotland to give up its oil and gas rights so that tax revenues on oil industry profits can be seized by London.
Essentially this "loss of oil and gas rights" argument makes a much better case in favour of Scottish independence, than it does against the EU!
12. Forced entry into Schengen (lie)
Only six member states are outside the Schengen zone: Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Ireland, Romania and the UK.
There are no plans to force member states to join the Schengen free travel area by 2022, and definitely not in the Lisbon Treaty. In fact the only reference to forced Schengen acceptance anywhere is a 2017 article in the Daily Express based on a load of fear-mongering nonsense about how the EU might punish Britain if it cancels Brexit (punishment the December 2018 ECJ ruling declared unlawful should the UK parliament decide to revoke Article 50).
Perhaps the original author of this copy n' paste propaganda mistook their copy of the Daily Express for the Lisbon Treaty?
13. Loss of control of planning legislation (lie)
Town and city planning is not an EU competence. This means they don't set planning rules for member states. Sometimes EU laws impact national planning legislation (stuff like air pollution laws) but the idea that the nasty EU superstate is going to take over your local council planning office is so absurd it's extraordinary that people actually believe this nonsense.
14. Loss of armed forces and nuclear weapons (lie)
The EU does not have an army and any decision to create an EU army would have to be made unanimously. Many member states remain steadfastly opposed to the idea. Additionally there is absolutely nothing in the Lisbon Treaty forcing the creation of an EU army, forcing member states to give up their own armies, or compelling member states to hand over their nuclear weapons (in the case of the two member states that actually have them).
The Lisbon Treaty doesn't even mention the creation of an EU army. All it mentions is a the framing of common defence and security policies, which means cooperation between EU states on issues like combating terrorism (do we want to share intelligence on terrorist threats with our European allies or not?) and mutual defence (if you don't like that idea you should absolutely hate NATO shouldn't you?).
One of the most absurd things about this threat that "the EU are going to steal our nukes" is that they've already been stolen. In 1997 the Tory government privatised Trident into the hands of a consortium which is now run by three private companies, two US-based (Jacobs Engineering & Lockheed Martin) and one UK-based (Serco).
Imagine the detachment from reality it would take to be horrified and outraged about an entirely fictional threat that "the EU are going to steal our nukes", but 100% relaxed about the observable reality that our nukes are actually being run by a bunch of private corporations!
15. Loss of taxation policy (lie)
According to this point the EU is supposedly planning to revoke member states' ability to form their own taxation policies at some point in the near future.
Why member states would ever allow that to happen is not explained. Neither is the section of the Lisbon Treaty that supposedly proposes this radical policy (exactly like all of the other 26 points).
What kind of cognitively illiterate idiot believes the assertion the the EU is going to unilaterally take over all member states' taxation policies based on absolutely no evidence whatever?
16. Loss of national law (lie)
Again, what kind of idiot just believes that the EU is going to be able to prevent member states from creating their own laws with no evidence whatever?
Which member states would vote in favour of a treaty to abolish the legislative role of their own parliaments?
Somehow we're expected to believe that all of the nations of the EU are so stupid that they'd vote to abolish themselves!
17 The UK loses its standing in the Commonwealth (lie)
Again, there's no reference to any specific legislation here. People are just expected to unquestioningly accept the vague assertion that the UK must lose standing in the Commonwealth, and this loss of standing has something to do with the Lisbon Treaty (which doesn't even mention the Commonwealth in the entire text).
Talk about assuming your audience to be a bunch of idiots!
18. Loss of British overseas territories (lie)
Not only does this point fail to explain how this supposed loss of British Overseas Territories like the Falklands, Gibraltar, and Cayman Islands has anything to do with the EU or the Lisbon Treaty, it doesn't even explain where the sovereignty of these territories is transferred to. Do they become independent states, vassal states of the EU, or do they just get erased from existence by some kind of space laser?
It's just another reiteration of the nasty EU bully boy stealing our toys, but the author is lagging now so they can't even be arsed to explain it any more, we're just expected to believe it because they set themselves up as an authority figure at the beginning with their claim to have read the Lisbon Treaty (a document that doesn't even mention the British Overseas Territories).
19. Loss of control of judicial system (lie)
What does the claim that "the UK loses control of its judicial system" even mean?
The British judicial system isn't just one entity, it's divided into three different systems (Scottish Law, Northern Ireland Law, English and Welsh Law). All of these three systems are necessarily independent from government control. The idea of government appointed judges is the terrifying stuff of totalitarianism.
So who "controls" the justice system in Britain now? And by what means are the EU supposedly threatening to seize control of it for themselves?
And how does any of this fit in with the fact that the EU has been suing the Polish government in an effort to protect the independence of the Polish judiciary?
20 & 21 Loss of control of national and international policy (lies)
This is such a vague complaint it's difficult to figure out which section of the Lisbon Treaty supposedly enables this terrible power-grab by the EU bully-boys.
Like most of the crap in this list, concerns over national and international policy are already covered by points 6 and 16 that wildly claimed that the EU would result in the abolition of parliament and the eradication of UK law.
How a country is supposed to develop "national policy" or "international policy" without a national parliament or national law is an interesting question ... Or it would be if all of the claims weren't just fear-mongering bullshit with no basis in reality whatever.
22. Loss of nationhood (lie)
I'd really like to see the section of the Lisbon treaty that says that all member states lose their right to call themselves a nation in their own right.
It's easy to see that whoever compiled this list was badly running out of steam by this point, but the idea that the identities of member states would be completely erased is such lazy hyperbolic nonsense that anyone with the faintest grip on reality should have been laughing out loud at the idiocy of it by this point.
But somehow no! Somehow tens of thousands of people actually read this shit, believed it, wrote furious comments about it, and helped spread these transparently obvious lies even further by sharing it.
23. Loss of space exploration programme (lie)
The British Space Agency was established in 2010. It has a budget of £372 million, much of which is accounted for by Britain's investments in multinational collaborative projects like the Galileo Satellite Navigation system, the European Space Agency Subscriptions, and the EU Satellite Centre.
The European Space Agency has a budget of £5 billion, and by walking away from the EU the UK is going to lose access to this project, and the British Space Agency is going to be left as a deflated husk with no space programme at all.
There never was an EU plan to take over the British Space Agency, however by quitting the EU the Brexiteers are absolutely trashing Britain's space exploration potential.
There's so much wrong in this list of lies that it beggars belief, but like the financial services fear-mongering in point 4, this one is especially egregious in the way it completely reverses reality by addressing a subject which provides one of the strongest reasons against quitting the EU as a reason to quit the EU.
Just ask any astrophysicist (or scientist in general) if they think that Britain quitting the EU is going to be great news for British science and space exploration.
24. Loss of aviation and sea lane jurisdiction (lie)
Guess what ... The Lisbon Treaty doesn't even mention aviation or shipping.
25. Loss of rebate (lie)
This lie is particularly easy to disprove. The Lisbon Treaty doesn't even mention the rebate, let alone set out a hard and fast expectations of increased contributions from member states.
As a result of the definitely-not-cancelled rebate, the UK (population 66 million) still pays significantly less than Italy (population 60 million) for its EU membership!
The aforementioned ECJ ruling on Article 50 found that the EU couldn't punish the UK by cancelling the rebate, so even if we decide to stay in after pissing them about for three years, the rebate stays.
26. Dodgy financial calculations (lies)
The list finishes of with a list of dodgy unsourced calculations referring to the claim in point 25, and speculating vastly increased UK contributions to the EU budget.
It's unclear when the first iteration of this absurd list of lies was compiled, but the Lisbon Treaty came into effect in 2009, which was followed by a period in which the UK's contribution to the EU budget declined significantly between 2013 and 2017!
If the Lisbon Treaty did set out specific financial expectations of member states (it didn't) then they must have got their maths spectacularly wrong to demand an extra £billion+ year on year, only for the UK contribution to fall by well over £1 billion between 2013 and 2017!
Conclusion
The conclusion to the post tends to vary like the introduction, with people replacing the original with screeds of their own.
This particular version does a bit of sneering contempt for young people positing that their pack of lies about the future is what the younger generations are complaining about, when their actual legitimate complaints are that they don't want another economic crisis because we still haven't recovered from the last one thanks to 9 years of ruinous Tory austerity dogma, they don't want to lose their right to live, work, study, and travel across Europe, they don't want a wave of job losses, or chaos at our ports and airports, and they don't want their European-born friends/family members/work colleagues/neighbours treated with derision and contempt by Theresa May's xenophobic government.
It then goes on to claim that young people should be "on their knees" thanking Brexit voters for saving them from becoming Orwellian automatons, which is decidedly ironic given the clearly identifiable use of loads of Orwellian reality-reversing propaganda within the 26 point barrage of lies.
Then it finishes off with a conspiracy theory that Brexit is not dragging out because the process of quitting a political union you've been integrating with for four decades is a lot more complex than just putting a cross on a piece of paper and hoping for the best, but actually because there's some special deadline in 2020 (or is it 2022? as several of the 26 points claim) that will result in the seizure of our army, resources, and assets, the subjugation of our parliament and judiciary, the theft of our financial industry and space agency, the destruction of our borders, and the de facto abolition of the UK!
And do you know what the worst thing is?
If you ever point out that all the evidence points to the fact that Brexit is going to be an economic disaster, jobs will be lost, industries will flee, and Britain will be humbled on the international stage, the type of people who shared this despicable pack of fear-mongering lies will shriek "project fear" at you in order to discredit all the facts and evidence you try to bring to the table as if you're the one pushing fear-mongering lies!
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When the Labour-defecting MP Angela Smith made her weird and racist comments about British Asians being "funny tinge" on the big day these splitters had been plotting for months, this racist gaffe was obviously going to attract a lot of ridicule.
The mess was made even worse when Smith and her fellow splitter MPs decided that there should be no disciplinary process, and agreed the line that she only spouted racist remarks because she was "very tired" (is it just me or is 'I was only racist because I was tired' an extraordinary excuse that implies racism is an inherent attribute that is always there, but only leaks out under conditions like tiredness, stress, or drunkenness?).
For context this is a bunch of MPs who spent months bitterly attacking Labour's internal processes for dealing with bigotry, who then immediately give one of their own MPs a total free pass on a bizarre outburst of 1970s-style racism, revealing the fact that they have absolutely no disciplinary procedures at all for dealing with racism in the ranks!
This shockingly lax attitude to dealing with racism is hardly surprising from a group who all either abstained on, or actually voted in favour of Theresa may's racist "Hostile Environment" legislation that created the Windrush Scandal, and resulted in black Britons being deported to their deaths overseas.
This bizarre and hypocritical "funny tinge" episode was always going to provoke derision, and the word "tinge" has subsequently been used to ridicule the Independent Group.
Nicknames, satire, and political shorthand have always been a fundamental part of UK political discourse, but ever since "tinge" became a thing there have been an awful lot of people turning up in comments threads to cry that calling Independent Group "tinge" is unfair, improper, offensive, and even Trumpian!
Amazingly these are people who will willingly and uncritically accept the explanation that Angela Smith slurred British Asians as "funny tinges" because she was "very tired" but then get hyper-offended at other people using the term "tinge" to refer to the group of MPs who continue to side with Smith, and who fully accept her outrageous 'I was only racist because I was tired' excuse!
In this warped worldview it's apparently perfectly fine to refer to the "tinge" of British Asians' skin as being "funny", but then unspeakably offensive to use the word "tinge" as satirical shorthand for the group the woman who did this belongs to!
The same thing happens when you use the political shorthand "parliamentary squatters" to describe the fact these MPs have refused to call by-elections in their constituencies because they're a bunch of democracy-fearing cowards who know they'd lose their seats if they actually put their divisive and egotistical actions to the vote.
The reason pro-austerity centrists are getting so upset about the use of satirical shorthand like "tinge" and "squatter" to describe the Independent Group actually has nothing to do with these words being offensive in their own right, it's that these people know that satire and shorthand are very effective ways of influencing public opinion.
If nicknames and descriptions like "tinge" and "squatter" are allowed to stick, people will be continually reminded about this group's shockingly lax attitude to racism in their ranks and the fact that they're so terrified of democracy that they're treating the constituencies that elected them with contempt.
So they react with outrage, and attempt to impose a form of political correctness to police political satire (meta political correctness if you like) because they desperately want to stamp out the kind of political satire that satirises the opaquely funded, self-serving, Tory-facilitating, pro-austerity centrism they approve of.
These people are not upset because the words "tinge" and "squatter" are offensive, they're upset because they're effective.
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The 11 (and counting) squatter MPs are all pushing this populist "politics is broken" trope as hard as they can, and positioning themselves as the heroic saviours.
In this article I'm going to look at the absolute chaos this "politics is broken" trope has already unleashed in three other major economies, before looking at the squatter MPs and their Independent Group (AKA 'Tinge') in more detail.
What I'm not going to do is argue that politics isn't broken. Britain wouldn't be in this farcical Brexit shit-show if the political establishment class hadn't put us here, and anti-vaxxers, grifters, and smarmy charlatans would never have got their hands on the levers of power in Italy, the United States, and France had their political systems not been flawed enough to allow them to either.
The point is that just because someone is repeatedly saying "politics is broken" doesn't mean you have to unquestioningly accept the way they position themselves as the only possible saviours.
Italy
The Five Star Movement is a populist anti-politics political party founded in 2009 by the stand-up comedian and polemicist Beppe Grillo.
This party has used the big tent political strategy to build a disparate coalition of all kinds of people with eurosceptics, anti-globalists, direct democracy advocates, and anti-vaxxers making up several of their core demographics.
Initially attractive to people on the left for their anti-establishment, environmentalist, and direct democracy advocacy, it soon became clear that this party was shifting rapidly towards the extreme-right.
This rightwards shift became absolutely indisputable when the 5 Star MEPs in the European Parliament joined Nigel Farage's rag-tag band of far-right eurosceptics in 2014, but unfortunately, as in Britain, Italians pay very little attention to the internal machinations of the European Parliament, so this collusion with far-right fanatics and outright fascists went virtually unnoticed.
The March 2018 Italian General Election was the huge M5S breakthrough moment, they won the most votes and landed enough seats to make them kingmakers in the Italian parliament. In May 2018 they created a coalition with the fascist party Lega Nord bringing fascism back to the Italian government for the first time in decades.
Since then the popularity of Five Star has waned (although they're still extremely popular with the anti-vaxxer movement for the radical anti-science policies they've enacted) while the fascists they enabled into power have soared in popularity from the 3rd most popular party to by far the most popular.
So the lesson from Italy is clear: Vote for the "politics is broken" populists and get anti-vaxxers and fascism.
United States
I'm pretty sure I don't need to explain all that much about the last few years in US politics.
Donald Trump used "politics is Broken" style populism to position himself as the ideological saviour who was going to "drain the swamp" and "bring the jobs back" to places like the rust belt.
People believed him, he got elected, he immediately filled the top administration jobs with more Wall Street bankers, corporate stooges, and inherited wealth billionaires than any government in US history, then he set about attacking the health care and social security systems, and then he implemented the biggest tax handout for the mega-rich ever.
Nothing for the little people who voted him into power, and a massive windfall for his mega-rich mates. Who would have thought such a thing could happen when you elect billionaire from the international speculator class as your President?
So the lesson from the United States is clear: Vote for the "politics is broken" populists and get Trumpism.
France
The situation in France is by far the most analogous to what's currently happening in Britain.
Emmanuel Macron was a right-wing neoliberal who embedded himself within the centre-left socialist party.
As minister of economy and finance in the socialist government he set about implementing spectacularly unpopular labour reforms that triggered mass protests and trashed the government's popularity.
After destroying the socialist government from within he walked away to set up a shiny new "centrist" party called En Marche which used the whole "politics is broken" and "we are the saviours" schtick to great effect.
What better way to sell neoliberalism to the public than point out all of the failings of neoliberalism (several of which you were personally involved with), then present yourself as the shiny new alternative?
The problem of course is that when you promise people change, but then deliver more of the same but even worse in the form of massive tax cuts for corporations and the mega-rich, fuel price increases loaded on the poor, even more ideological attacks on labour rights, deeply unpopular education reforms, and significantly collapsing living standards - people tend to get angry.
And when the French get angry they don't just unthinkingly vote in favour of a massive act of national self-harm and then grovellingly re-elect the bastards who trashed their living standards in the first place like us Brits do. They revolt, they protest, they riot.
France has been wracked by 14 consecutive weeks of mass protests and Macron has gone from winning the Presidency and an absolute landslide in the French parliament, to being the most unpopular President in French history with an approval rating only slightly better than cancer.
The most incredible thing about it is that he's managed to nose-dive his Presidency and reduce his nation to mass protests, riots, division, police brutality, and chaos in significantly less than two years!
So the lesson from France is clear: Vote for the "politics is broken" populists and get absolute bloody chaos.
Britain
So the Independent Group ('Tinge') parliamentary squatters are pushing the exact same rhetoric as these other populist movements. "Politics is broken", and guess what? Only they can save us!
The problem of course is that every single one of them is an establishment insider to the core, with several of them being particularly to blame for the current shit-show.
Before the EU referendum Chuka Umunna added fuel to the anti-EU bonfire by fulminating against Freedom of Movement and scapegoating European immigrants. Now he actually expects us to believe him when he positions himself as the glorious saviour to the Brexit mess that he actually helped to create by actively turning Labour Party members against free movement!
Mike Gapes, Joan Ryan, and Ann Coffey are all responsible for the thing that created the biggest ever rift in trust between British people and the Westminster political establishment class. Despite the biggest public protests in British history in 2003, these people voted in favour of the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq on the grounds of terrifying Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Hundreds of thousands died, millions were displaced, these terrifying WMDs were never found because they didn't exist, and Iraq was turned into a lawless terrorism breeding ground that eventually gave birth to the monstrosity of ISIS.
To make matters even worse these warmongers all repeatedly voted against holding an inquiry into their disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq, and all hate Jeremy Corbyn on the basis that he was absolutely right that Iraq was going to be a disaster, and because they simply can't bear to admit that they have the blood of hundreds of thousands of people on their hands.
Anna Soubry is one of the three Tories to have joined the squatters citing her opposition to Brexit as a factor in her decision, but incredibly she actually voted in favour of Theresa May's hard-right EU Withdrawal Act in January 2018 while Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour front bench opposed it! Some brave and principled Brexit saviour eh?
Perhaps the most telling thing of all is that all 11 of the squatter MPs are either austerity-enforcers who actually voted in favour of the ruinous Tory austerity dogma that trashed British living standards and created the massive wave of public anger that drove Brexit narrowly over the winning line, or they're austerity abstainers from the right-wing fringe of the Labour Party who actually turned a blind eye to the suffering of millions of their fellow citizens to sit on their hands as the Tories voted though the biggest package of social security cuts in British history in 2015.
Anyone who imagines that this opportunistic group of pro-austerity fanatics, ideological contortionists, self-serving opportunists, and unrepentant warmongers from deep within the ranks of the political establishment class is going to fix our "broken politics" and lead a glorious British revival is clearly working at the same extraordinary level of delusion as those who voted in favour of Brexit thinking a Tory administered abandonment of the EU would immediately turn the UK into the land of milk and honey for all.
But the worrying thing is that there is already a lot of support for this fake political party (established as a private company in order to evade scrutiny of their financial affairs) with no policies, no members, no internal democracy, no leader, no respect for the people in their constituencies, and no disciplinary procedures for bigoted MPs who spout racist nonsense on the TV!
It's looking a lot like the shiny but empty promise of Macronism all over again, built by another bunch of hopeless charlatans desperately trying to keep orthodox neoliberalism alive by rebranding it as a wonderful new form of 'centrism' that will somehow miraculously "fix our broken politics".
Unfortunately this blatant con trick has been shown to work effectively in other major economies with predictably disastrous results, so only the complacent would imagine that it couldn't possibly work here too.
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